WESTERN BUREAU:

Small ganja farmers seeking a stake in the emerging cannabis industry are worried that inadequate funding to streamline their cultivation could relegate them to plantation workers when the multibillion-dollar industry takes shape.

"We cannot be the people who have been sacrificed over the years for the development of ganja in Jamaica to be limited to just mere workers on a plantation," Devon Evans, the president of the St Ann Ganja Growers' Association, told The Gleaner in an interview, during the just-concluded CanEx Jamaica Business Conference and Expo in Montego Bay.

"We would like to revive the ganja spirit but it needs funding, and if we don't get funding probably we just have to play our role as workers," Evans emphasised.

He also expressed concerns about restrictions on small ganja farmers which, he said, are limiting their capacity to be viable.

"The amount of restriction placed on us [small ganja farmers] need to be lifted because a small farmer will not be able to find $500,000 to even start to prepare a small plot," said Evans.

He urged the Government to open up the industry to small ganja farmers. "We are looking, as a cooperative, to revive the entire community of Bamboo in St Ann, which was once known as a ganja-growing area ... ."

Like Evans, Ras Iyah V, who heads the Westmoreland Hemp and Ganja Farmers Association, said that despite being a member of the board of the Cannabis Licensing Authority, the agency charged with the responsibility to regulate the industry by issuing licences, he too has issues about the way things are being done.

"To the investors who are coming here, don't come to re-establish a sugar plantation policy, wherein our people are just used because they can provide the labour," said Iyah V. "I would like to see investors coming here with their money, the technology, and partner with us because that is what the grass-roots farmers don't have."